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[Mumanu Disclaimer: I have chopped up this article up from the original. Apparently it’s written as satire, but actually, it’s more like common sense blended with comedy]Source: By Paul Zimmer hells-ditch.com
Date: August 6th, 2012FRANKFURT- In a rare display of professional consensus, an international consortium of anthropologists, archaeologists, and molecular biologists have formally released an exasperated sigh over the popularity of the so-called “Paleo Diet” during a two-day conference dedicated to the topic.The Paleo Diet is a nutritional framework based on the assumption that the human species has not yet adapted to the dietary changes engendered by the development of agriculture over the past ten thousand years. Proponents of the diet emphasize in particular the negative effects of eating large quantities of grain and its numerous by-products, which can lead to hypertension, obesity, and various other health problems. Instead, the Paleo Diet posits that a reliance on lean meats, fresh fruits, and vegetables while minimizing processed food is the key to health and longevity.

The nutritional benefits of the diet are not what the grievance is about, said Dr. Britta Hoyes, who organized the event. She agreed that a high-carbohydrate diet can have a detrimental effect on long-term health, as many studies have demonstrated. Instead, the group’s protest is a reaction to the biological and historical pediments of the diet, in particular the contention that pre-agricultural societies were only adapted to eat those foods existing before the Neolithic Revolution.

Hoyes, a paleoethnobotanist who specializes in reconstructing prehistoric subsistence, stated that only thing unifying the myriad diets that she’s studied has been their diversity. “You simply do not see specific, trans-regional trends in human subsistence in the archaeological record. People can live off everything from whale blubber to seeds and grasses. You want to know what the ideal human diet consists of? Everything. Humans can and will eat everything, and we are remarkably successful not in spite of this fact, but because of it. Our adaptability is the hallmark of the human species. We’re not called omnivores for nothing.”

“Nearly every food item you currently eat today has been modified from its ancestral form, typically in a drastic way, ” he [Karl Fenst] began. “The notion that we have not yet adapted to eat wheat, yet we have had sufficient time to adapt to kale or lentils is ridiculous. In fact, for most practitioners of the Paleo Diet, who are typically westerners, the majority of the food they consume has been available to their gene pool for less than five centuries. Tomatoes, peppers, squash, potatoes, avocados, pecans, cashews, and blueberries are all New World crops, and have only been on the dinner table of African and Eurasian populations for probably 10 generations of their evolutionary history. Europeans have been eating grain for the last 10,000 years; we’ve been eating sweet potatoes for less than 500. Yet the human body has seemingly adapted perfectly well to yams, let alone pineapple and sunflower seeds.”

When asked what she would tell people who wished to pursue a true paleolithic diet, Dr. Hoyes laughed harshly before replying. ”You really want to be paleo? Then don’t buy anything from a store. Gather and kill what you need to eat. Wild grasses and tubers, acorns, gophers, crickets- They all provide a lot of nutrition. You’ll spend a lot of energy gathering the stuff, of course, and you’re going to be hungry, but that’ll help you maintain that lean physique you’re after. And hunting down the neighbor’s cats for dinner because you’ve already eaten your way through the local squirrel population will probably give you all the exercise you’ll ever need.”

hahahahaa! Eat what you like and as long as it doesn’t kill you and you can reproduce, then it’s fair game. However, if you want a healthy and happy life you should eat good foods. Humans are really good at adapting to new and varied foods so limiting things just because they’re new to our plate doesn’t make sense (unless you have allergies). Cavemen ate everything and anything (except McDonalds!) so we should too.

Most of the anti-Paleo comments I’ve ever seen are “straw-man” arguments made against incorrect assumptions that are made about the Paleo diet. I have read Loren Cordain and Robb Wolf, and both of them have been pretty sound from an archaeological/anthropological perspective. These authors have both pointed out the wide variety of diet that Paleolithic man ate, and encourage dietary diversity, even if it’s often overlooked by adherents of the diet.

Some of these arguments made above are rather disingenuous, as well.

While it’s true that a diet that will keep you alive for 25 years is really all that’s needed to be “reproductively successful”. The girl who ate only chicken nuggets until she was old enough to reproduce is the perfect example– it doesn’t make chicken nuggets a “healthy” food. The fact is: diets which made a staple of grains reduced lifespans. Many ancient Egyptian slaves ate bread and beer for upwards of 80% of their calories, and lived short lives. Yes, they lived long enough to reproduce, and it allowed women to get enough calories to pop one baby after another out of their wombs, leading to a relative population increase, but it did not help them live longer, healthier lives than their non-agrarian forebears.

The birth rate rose faster than the death rate, but the death rate also increased from illness (caused by malnutrition). Today, birth rates are still high in areas where they only eat rice each day, every day… but many go blind or die from Vitamin A deficiency.

If you want to live a long, healthy life, with vitality into your 80s, 90s and beyond, a grain-filled diet is not the way to do it.

Another fallacy pointed out above is the one pertaining to North American foods. Many Paleo experts urge caution about the nightshades, in particular, because many people exhibit sensitivities to them. However, squashes and sweet potatoes seem to have low toxicity rates… but not necessarily because we have adapted to them specifically. Let’s put it this way: turkeys are native to North America, but are not all that different from pheasants, chickens, and other fowl which are found worldwide, and have been a part of the human diet for at least tens of thousands of years. Absent particular toxins in the bird’s meat, one bird is just about like any other diet-wise. Squashes and sweet potatoes pretty much resemble other fruits and tubers we had already adapted to elsewhere.

Grains, however, are a relative newcomer to our diets. Few grains are soft enough to chew without some pre-processing (oats and maize being exceptions); with soaking and boiling, sprouting, or grinding into flour being necessary. The last method is particularly time-consuming without the help of machinery. Our primitive ancestors did some sprouting of grains and legumes for food in some areas, but grains and legumes did not make up a significant (>15%) portion of our calories until the development of agriculture.

With that in mind, is it terrible to have a little bread now and then? Probably not, unless it’s something to which you have a particular allergy or sensitivity. But most of the experts I’ve read aren’t really recommending a complete abstinence of agricultural products. These things fall on a continuum of “bad for you”. My own body doesn’t like too many peppers or tomatoes these days, but I enjoy a black bean dip and salsa now and then. I still avoid wheat bread.

See, the paleo people are willing to accept the “turkey is similar enough to other meat and sweet potatoes are similar enough to other tubers”… but not willing to accept “grains are similar enough to tubers, they’re both starchy” or “dairy is similar enough to meat, they’re both a protein”. [With straight milk rather than cheese or yogurt, there’s also lactose to consider, but is that so different from eating roasted meat with tubers cooked in the firepit?]

But they’re NOT similar enough, and that’s the whole point. Grains and tubers are fundamentally chemically and structurally different. Your other example is also a poor comparison, although not as ridiculous – dairy and meat are a very different protein set, although I believe the fats are similar.

Not only are they not similar enough, they create entirely different diets. Grains aren’t as perishable and may be stored for longer periods of time. Food surpluses and grain based diets turned us into a more inert, an less healthy, species.

I don’t see how your point is relevant to the people trying to decide whether to follow the Paleo Diet. Whether they eat brown rice or sweet potatoes, they’re gonna be picking them up at the grocery store.
BTW, the process you use to harvest food does not fall under “diet”.

Cordain may seem “sound enough” but he is not an archeologist, anthropologist, or paleobotanist (he is a nutritionist). The point is, our ancestors did not eat like this, it’s a marketing tactic and people buy it because the nutritional aspects of it are sound. I don’t really think it is a straw-man argument since the issue really is with the historical inaccuracies. Like the article says, the issue isn’t about actually health, it’s about the fact that most of his archaeological research is faulty (for example claiming that paleolithic people were free of many diseases, when in fact they were not free of them or whose presence cannot be detected anyways). Disclaimer: online posts can seem accusatory and aggressive, I’m just trying to have a convo about it)

That’s true… unless it’s actually bullshit, and the Japanese are known for having the longest lifespans. What’s their main dish? Oh… a GRAIN! Oops. They better stop eating rice, they’re obviously in need of a flashy and extreme dietary makeover!

“Many ancient Egyptian slaves ate bread and beer for upwards of 80% of their calories, and lived short lives.”

… Hmm, wonder why. Maybe it’s because they were SLAVES and lived in poor conditions. Saying “slaves who ate nothing but two things had short lifespans cuz grains!” just sounds ridiculous to anyone with half a brain.

Not to mention you DIDN’T mention how many calories they were eating total. They could have been doing slave labor on only 800 calories of bread and beer, which would make your argument invalid because NOBODY will be able to live long off of that.

I could eat nothing but 8 eggs a day and work outside in poor conditions with no medical care and if I died, I COULD cherry pick and say “I died cuz of eggs!” but that’s just as stupid as blaming a grain diet for the short lifespans of malnourished slaves.

But seriously rice isn’t the centerpiece of a typical Japanese diet. It’s not like they sit around eating rice all day. They eat a lot of fish, fruit and vegetables. Don’t mistake rice’s common occurrence in meals for dominance in terms of their overall caloric intake, and don’t ignore their much smaller portion sizes.

Millions of people eat diets that include grain and live a vital, healthy life into their eighties. Yes, our diets have come to include too much over-processed starch (with sugars, salt, and fats added). But look at the 80, 90, and 100-year-old people alive today, many of whom are healthy. Many of them ate what we in the 1970s called “balanced” diets: meat, starch, fiber at most meals. I don’t buy it from the paleo proponents *or* from the plant-based/vegan proponents that [meat or grain, pick your, er, poison] is “unhealthy” in any amount.

The point about surviving to replicate is simply stating that from the viewpoint of evolution, our bodies don’t have a perfect diet. Any diet that allows the body to have offspring is perfect. That is the one, and only, thing that evolution cares about.

Therefore, creating a diet where the main philosophy is that our bodies haven’t evolved to eat certain foods just doesn’t make sense. The article isn’t arguing the health benefits of the paleo diet, it’s arguing that the reasons being used to sell the diet are simply wrong.

Your argument is also a straw man. You assume the only reason Egyptians didn’t live past their 20’s was because of their diet. You also straw man the fruit that many of us are used to. In my eyes, the squash is a foreign fruit, entirely. I wouldn’t even know how to cook it. North American diet is not a diet which we have evolved from. I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but the Ancestors of American are traditionally Irish, English, Italian and so on. And that 1/16th cherokee doesn’t make up for that. America has been a country for no more than 300 years. We have been using grain for 10,000 years. if Squash is similar enough to a fruit our bodies are used to, then we can have adapted to processing grains.

Nuts are also difficult to eat without some form of processing, some of them even poisonous.

If your overall point is “Being strict on the paleo diet isn’t important, it’s just important to believe what I’m saying” then you’re undeserving of having a point. Eating too much of anything is bad for you, the amounts which are too much are individual, and having an awareness of your body is key when considering dieting, though there’s been much research into particular food groups, so paying attention to that research (and ensuring it’s credible) is the best way to go.

My main point here is don’t complain about straw men when you’re building one yourself.

I actually do hope this article is fake because it is so ridiculously short-sighted and pointless it boggles my mind. If, in fact, it is true it is shameful that anyone took the time to basically give the ‘Paleo’ diet a dressing-down because they don’t agree with the name or some of the evidence they used. Perhaps some of the info regarding the diet isn’t 100% solid but if people use it and it works then who cares what it’s called?? The fact that someone subsisted on chicken nuggets is a testament to how resilient the human body is regardless of what kind of trash they put into it. Fast-forward a few years and I’d wager this person is suffering from some debilitating disease as a result of their lifestyle choices. “Eat what you want” is the reason there are so many sick and fat people on this planet today and the food industry knows this so they keep making more and more terrible things to tempt people with. If this ‘study’ is for real, I’d have to dub it “A Study for Fat People, by Fat People.”

Geoff,
I think you are focusing on the wrong part of the article. The point of this is not to say that the foods listed in this fad diet are not good for you (they mostly are, and help one to live a healthier life), the point is to point out that the diet is not Paleolithic in any way shape or form because most of the foods from the paleolithic simply don’t exist anymore.
This article is about scientific literacy and the importance of truth. Would you hold your same “it doesn’t matter what it is called and what the justifications are as long as it works” policy for other things in life? What about medicine? Shall we start lying to sick people? does informed consent mean nothing as long as the results are positive? The entire scientific field of Taxonomy and Phylogeny are based on making sure things have the same name so that we may better understand the world around us.
Additionally you seem to take issue with the statement “Eat what you want.” I agree that poor dietary choices are a contributor to failing health but does that mean the choice of the individual should be taken away? Would you support a dietary mandate set down by a government? The phrase “eat what you want” is not actual health advice, it is an acknowledgment of personal choice when it comes to what someone puts in their body, this goes for healthy food and for bad food.
Again, this article is about scientific literacy, if we are lucky we get to make tons of free choices in life, but sadly the one thing we cannot chose are the facts.
Have a lovely day,
-MRCL

Just an afterthought riff on the statement “Perhaps some of the info regarding the diet isn’t 100% solid but if people use it and it works then who cares what it’s called?” I wonder if you would care if I relabeled all of your DVDs. Yeah the Star Wars dvd is in the Star Trek case but it’s still the same thing.

I’m not sure if you can measure a health issue by using a weight measure.. However, it is also noteworthy that Indians eat and drink lots of sweat things, and a skinny is not desirable because it is equated with poor.

India has TONS of people.
They have the second largest population in the world so I’m sure they have a lot of diabetics. Probably more than in the states, however that doesn’t mean the rate of its occurrence is higher than anywhere else.

Everything in moderation.. Even moderation 🙂
I tried the paleo diet for a couple months. Didn’t do it for any evolutionary reasons, but because people already on the diet said it helped with inflammation and stiffness in their tissues. It worked for me too. I woke up feeling better, but I also found myself eating four or five full meals a day as my (already super fast) metabolism went in to overdrive. I couldn’t afford to feed myself. Carbs are cheap 🙂
That just happens to be my experience.

Making it to breeding age is not the key as stated in the article. If you produced one child while your buddy produced 100, and that ratio continued just a few generations, your DNA would likely disappear. Getting pregnant or impregnating is not enough, you have to have fecundity and survivalability in your DNA and choose partners with the same traits. The most successful DNA that I am aware of is that of Gheghis Khan — 10% of males in what was the old Mongol empire are direct decendents, and 1 in 200 males in the entire world.

To quote Ghenghis:
“The greatest joy for a man is to defeat his enemies, to drive them before him, to take from them all they possess, to see those they love in tears, to ride their horses, and to hold their wives and daughters in his arms.”

Wouldn’t be as successful a philosophy today. Thinking about reasons for historical success, it explains aggressive horn-dog males and submissive gold-digger females, as they would have obvious advantages in creating the next generation and raising them to be as reproductive.

Or, for a less “aggressive horn-dog males and submissive gold-digger females” take, look up the Grandmother Hypothesis. But you’re right that making it to breeding age is not enough for humans. Human beings do not lay a large clutch of eggs and die, providing no parental care and producing no further offspring. Human offspring require care for longer than any other animal. Living to 18 is far from sufficient. Especially when you take into account adolescent subfertility. (Hunter-gatherers did/do not hit menarche nearly as early as women in developed countries do.)

But also see Huntington’s Disease, the classic example of evolution not caring much how much longer you live as long as you live long enough.

I’m not sure how the Genghis Khan example has anything to do with gold-digging–it’s not like he was paying child support. To say that the women were “rewarded” for their compliance is like saying “protection” rackets actually protect people.

Even the “aggressive horn-dog males” bit… You’ve got one Genghis Khan (and there’s some dispute about whether all those 10% are really attributable to Genghis personally), and how many men who died at an early age leaving behind few or no children, and no grandchildren? It’s a high-risk, high-reward strategy–don’t forget the high-risk part of the equation.

I’d also like to add that observed genetic rate of change does not equate to potential genetic rate of change. Every generation has DNA mutations, mostly unobservable and untested/used. If some massive environmental change or pandemic should wipe out 99.98% of the worlds population, and the remaining 0.01% had a rare genetics mutations protecting them, there would still be a few hundred million people left, and there would be rapid change in the human population’s genetics. That is what evolution is all about and why some species change quickly, and others have little changes after hundreds of millions of years.

No one knows just how much or how fast humans can adapt without large percentage die-offs, though you can infer a bit from the different environments/diets that humans have adapted to so far.

I don’t care much for the comments by the evolutionary biologists… I have a degree in the subject, and not arguing evolution itself. But, to say there is no advantage for life after reproduction is silly – by any professor’s standards. Ever heard of ensuring ones offspring also make it to reproduction? So, not borrowed time for grandparents, necessarily!!! That’s like saying just because you pop out a baby, you are done and all evolutionary goals have been met. Oh no, especially not for our style of reproduction. Let me know if you need more info. All in all, the whole article is moot, accordingly.,.

“The birth rate rose faster than the death rate, but the death rate also increased from illness (caused by malnutrition).” Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe the death rate is constant at 100%. Everyone’s gonna die of something, sometime. And if you want to compare the rates, then the birthrate is rising higher, resulting in population growth. Fuelled largely by the invention of agriculture, BTW.

Death rate is the frequency that individuals die at within a society/group. Yes everyone will die, but not at the same rate. You can’t really have a 100% death rate since that isn’t even how you express the mathmatics.

Death rate 100% that is funny. Everyone gets to caught up in what to eat. Watch how much you eat. My favorite is obese men and women blaming it on grains, when it was your hand that fed your face. They have proven that the less you eat (while staying healthy) the longer you live.
Oh and I have eaten high meat protien, veggies then small amounts of carbs all my life and stayed thin, but I am likely going to die from the cancer the meat give you 😉

Umm…women who’s husbands and fathers were murdered by Ghengis Khan, then were ‘held in his arms’, i.e. raped as ‘spoils of war’ by their husbands/fathers murderer-,-are-wait for it- ” Submissive Gold-diggers”. Wow. Really?? They were not terrified, prisoners of violence, or traumatized? They were consciously gold diggers w/o the spine to stand up for themselves to physically larger, stronger, armed, invaders who murdered their families? This conversation just went way past what to eat for health, fecundity, and longevity. Perhaps the danger here is not the piece of bread, but this negative , cruel, barely suppressed judgement of women. Seriously, think about your own family. Would you judge your mother, sister, daughter like this? This convo is about nutrition. Keep the personal gender bashing out of it. A strong man does not need to insult or judge others.

The article is making a straw man argument, which is being put out there by a a few nutritionalists and archeologists who are gleaming some limelight. Read about or talk to experts on the paleo diet, and the related, high-fat ketonic diet, and you will find the point that the mass production of cheap cereal grains led to human population explosion is not in dispute. The opportunities coming out of the neolithic revolution certainly got more people fed more regularly and brought them to reproductive success. What is in dispute is whether the protein & fat dominance in the diet, with a smaller portion of carbohydrates, is better for the individual over a lifetime. These bioarchaeologists are not addressing that issue. The writer of the article is confusing what the quoted scientist, Richard Wenkle described as “personal health” vs. “evolutionary fitness.” The point of the paleo diets is the personal health part. Those who oversimplify the pre-agricultural diet as devoid of carbohydrates are also wrong. There were some, but overall, far, far less than what makes up our diet today. The effect of modern diet is the yo-yo effect on our insulin system, the excess storage of fat (converted from carbs), and related problems that are generally evident in public health. The important studies in paleo diet find assert that the fossil evidence shows that the predominant meat & fat eaters had stronger bones, healthier bodies overall, and lived longer, from what I understand. That is the important point, whether that can be proven true or false. So far, I’m leaning more that way than a predominant carb diet that was pushed on us by the FDA with their false food pyramid for so many decades. Also, the point made by Dr. Hoyes that nothing in the grocery store is permissible in a paleo diet is incorrect. The “paleo” diet is not meant to be absolute and taken overly-literally. A common-sense approach to it doesn’t suggest you shouldn’t eat avocados or zuccini or something, just because they may not have been in their present form 10,000 years ago. The idea behind paleo, has to do with a dietary focus on animal proteins and fats, which are available to us. The straw-man argument against it is like saying that eating organic-labled food is useless, since petrochemical fertilizers are chemically “organic,” organically grown foods may still have harmful chemicals used, and that there is cross-contamination from non-organic farms. These things may be true, but it is likely that it is still healthier and environmentally-friendly to eat as much “organic” food as possible.

One of the problems with paleo formulations is that they don’t account for certain metabolic differences in hunter-gatherer societies that are specific to the environment, and to the fact that evolutionary shaping has taken that for granted.

Like, they think a diet high in animal-derived saturated fats should not increase your risk of heart disease, either because they don’t increase cholesterol (false), or because high LDL cholesterol isn’t a primary cause (false). They can’t seem decide between these explanations, which is another red flag.

Hunter-gatherers do tend to have low total cholesterol, but this is because most of them are infected with various blood-borne lipid eating parasites, and human evolution has “assumed” their presence as a given.

This is interesting-but- evolutionary success depends not only on breeding, but on raising your own children to an age where they can also reproduce successfully. The human strategy of reproduction is not to pop babies out into the sand and then have them swim off on their merry way- it is to protect and nurture them until their extremely fragile bodies and brains have literally matured to the point where they can defend and feed themselves (which incidentally, is about the same time when they can reproduce). Thus, having a long functional life, even having other non-breeding adults nearby who can assist, is highly adaptive. There are too many factors to consider in longevity than a simplistic carb/protein squabble… microorganisms, micronutrients, sun exposure, oxygen, water quality, community structure, sleep/work patterns, will you die in from other causes, etc. For example, the Akbasha of the Caucasus mountains in Russia ate a diet that was somewhere around 70% carbohydrate, yet include some of the oldest humans recorded; Okinawans eat more fish and protein, yet they do not eschew carbohydrates by any stretch. If anything, I think individuals might find it interesting to look into their own genetic history to see what their ancestors’ actual lifestyles consisted of- and then consider replicating it, if that’s the goal. Unless of course your particular genes point to a short-lived people who just barely got the job done, and the babes grown, before succumbing to the harsh reality that is human subsistence level living- in which case, I suggest you get yourself a latte and a bagel and something fun to do with your remaining time, for goodness sake.

Extremely simplistic view of evolution and survival . The factors needed for the human specie to become successful are greater than simply survival to reproductive age. If the Mother is not healthy her progeny will not survive. If the Father is not healthy and strong he cannot protect his offspring. Ancient Man may have had different requirements for such survival than modern man i.e. larger populations begat greater protection of weaker members, shelter is provided with greater regularity in larger populations. Stronger members can protect weaker members who may be reproducing providing numbers for the population but who would never have survived in small bands in ancient times. It goes on and on. The argument in this article does cover something about food and evolution but it also feeds the ignorance of the masses about simplistic single causes of evolutionary changes in species.

from my perspective, as someone who works in search and rescue, is that the “we werent made for these foods” reasoning is just a really nice way of getting inactive, (probably) overweight people to believe they can suddenly become healthier by eliminating some demon seed from their gut.

in reality, what we tell newcomers, is that how they get their energy for a search doesnt matter. we have 45 year old men (i mention their age because its indisputable that metabolism changes significantly after 30) who stop at a gas station and get dougnuts, etc, on their way out. if you lead an active lifestyle, you’ll burn through whatever energy source you put in your body, plain and simple. the reason vegetarians get nauseated if they eat meat is because theyve lost the fauna in their system to deal with the meat. the keyword, there, is “lost” meaning they either adapted to only eating vegetables, and/or they can adapt again to eating more meats.

all the philosophical diets are basically edible ab blasters, but without the “as seen on tv” box. its your lifestyle that makes you groggy mildly lethargic, inflexible, and stiff. if you want to actually BE healthier, youre going to have to get up and do something. if all you want is to feel better living an inactive lifestyle (which, of course, was the hallmark of our forebears….), then fine: compensate for your laziness. but dont make a big, philosophical to-do about it. just sit there in your laziness and be lazy. i’ll be out eating hostess cakes and, you know, rescuing injured hikers with a 40lb pack on my back.

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